Sexual Life Catherine M. Read online

  The little gang would come and wait for me late in the afternoon at the end of the road. They were happy and playful, and spotting them one day, the student’s father said with a cordial note in his voice that I must be a hell of girl to have all these boys at my disposal. In fact, I had given up counting. I had completely forgotten my childhood investigation into the permitted number of husbands. I was not a “collector,” and I thought that the boys and girls I saw at parties—mauling and being mauled and kissing until their breath gave out with as many people as possible so that they could boast about it the next day—were somehow offensive. I was happy simply to discover that the delicious giddiness I felt at the ineffably soft touch of a stranger’s lips, or a hand fitting itself over my pubis, could be experienced an indefinite number of times because the world was full of men predisposed to do just that. Nothing else really mattered. I had nearly lost my virginity to a boy who made quite an impression on me. He had a slightly drooping face, huge lips and very black hair. My attraction was probably because no arm or hand had ever covered so much of my body as when I lay trapped by the sweater he had pulled up over my head, and my panties that he held taut against my groin. That was the first time I had felt myself in the grip of my pleasure. The boy asked me if I wanted more. I had no idea what that might mean, because I couldn’t see what “more” I could possibly have. I brought the session to an end, and even though I continued this flirtation, meeting up with him regularly over the holidays, I never thought to take it further.

  Neither was I particularly taken with the idea of going out with someone, or with several people. I fell in love twice, and with both men, any physical relationship immediately became impossible: the first man had just gotten married and, anyway, showed no interest in me at all; the second lived a long way away. I therefore had little desire to hook up with a boyfriend. The student was too bland, André was as good as engaged to my friend and Ringo had a long-term partner. In Paris there was my first lover, Claude, and he seemed to be in love with a bourgeois girl who would utter such poetic sentences as “Touch my breasts, they’re so soft this evening” without letting him go any further. This example had quickly, if rather confusingly, taught me that I could not be classed as a great seductress, and that my place in the world was therefore not so much among the women facing the men, but alongside the men.

  Put simply, there was nothing to stop me from constantly renewing the experience of tasting a different saliva every time and blindly feeling with my hand for a form that would always be unexpected, a surprise. Claude had a beautiful dick, it was straight and well proportioned, and the memory I have of those very first couplings is a feeling of fullness, heaviness, as if all of me had been stiffened and filled. When André opened his fly in front of my face, I was amazed to find something smaller and more malleable, because, unlike Claude, he was not circumcised. A dick that is constantly exposed demands to be looked at, it provokes sexual excitement with its smooth monolithic contours, whereas the foreskin that you can play back and forth, uncovering the glans like a great bubble forming on the surface of soapy water, elicits a more subtle sensuality, its suppleness spreading in waves to your own orifice. Ringo’s dick was more like Claude’s, the shy boy’s more like André’s, the student’s belonged to a category that I would recognize later: those that, although not necessarily larger, are covered in a thicker outer layer, making them feel immediately more substantial in the hand. I discovered that every kind of dick required different movement, different behavior from me. And just as I had to adapt every time to another kind of skin, another complexion, different degrees of hairiness, different amounts of muscle tone (it goes without saying, for example, that not only do you hold on to a torso in a different way if it is smooth as a stone, or filled out with the beginnings of a bosom, or obscuring your view with a thatch of hair, but also that these images do not have the same resonance in your imagination: as a result, in retrospect, I seem to have been more submissive with the clean-cut or slightly rugged bodies that I perceived as truly male, whereas I took more initiative with heavier bodies that I feminized, however big they may have been), by the same token, the constitution of each body seemed to induce its own stances: I have pleasant memories of a very wiry body with a slender shaft that exclusively rammed into my ass as I offered it up into the air, thrusting in a series of jerks and as if from a distance, practically without touching any other part of my body apart from my hips, held in his hands; conversely, I didn’t like it—not that I ever tried to get away—when fatter men, whom I nevertheless found attractive, covered me too fully and, matching their behavior to their corpulence, tended to give smoochy kisses and to lick my face. In short, I entered my adult sexual life in the same way that, as a child, I went into the tunnel of a haunted-house ride, blindly and for the pleasure of being jostled about and grabbed as chance would have it. Or, you could say, swallowed up by it as a frog is by a snake.

  A few days after I got back to Paris, André sent me a letter to warn me, tactfully, that we all had the clap. My mother was the one who opened the envelope. I was sent to the doctor and banned from going out. But from then on, my own sense of propriety, which had become extremely intransigent, no longer tolerated living with my parents now that they could imagine me in the act of making love. I ran away from home, they brought me back; eventually, I left for good to go and live with Claude. The clap had been my baptism; for many years after, I lived in mortal terror of that scissoring pain, even though it struck me as being nothing more than a distinguishing sign, the shared fate of those who fuck a lot.

  “Like a Nut”

  In the biggest orgies in which I participated, from that time on, there could be up to about 150 people (they did not all fuck, some had come to watch), and I would take on the cocks of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways: in my hands, my mouth, my cunt and my ass. Sometimes I would exchanges kisses and caresses with women, but that was always less important. In the clubs, the proportion was far more variable, depending, obviously, on the clientele but also on the customs of each place—I will come back to that. It would be much more difficult to estimate the evenings spent in the Bois de Boulogne: should I count only the men that I sucked off with my head squashed next to their steering wheels, or those with whom I took the time to undress in the cabs of their trucks, and ignore the relay of faceless bodies behind the car doors, one hand maniacally rubbing up and down their cocks in diverse stages of erection while the other hand dived into the open car window to energetically knead my breasts? Today I can account for forty-nine men whose sexual organs have penetrated mine and to whom I can attribute a name or, at least, in a few cases, an identity. But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity. In the situations I am describing here, even if there were people I knew or recognized at an orgy, the confused succession of embraces and couplings was such that if I could distinguish individual bodies or their attributes, I could not always distinguish the people themselves. And when I refer to the attributes, I have to admit that I did not always have access to all of them; some exchanges are very ephemeral, and if I recognized a woman by the softness of her lips, I would not necessarily recognize her touch, which could be fiercely energetic. Sometimes I would realize only after the fact that I had been fondling a transvestite. I abandoned myself to the hydra. Until, that is, Éric broke away from the group to prise me out of it, in his own words, “like a nut from its shell.”

  I met Éric when I was twenty-one, not before his existence had been “announced” to me; some mutual friends had frequently assured me that, given my predispositions, he was perfect for me. After the holiday in Lyon I had continued having group sex with Claude. With Éric the regime intensified, not only because he took me to places where I could, as I have just shown, make myself available to an incalculable number of hands and penises, but more particularly because the sessions were well organized. To my way of thinking, there has always been a clear difference between, on the one hand, th
e more or less improvised situations that lead a group of people to redistribute themselves among the beds and sofas after a dinner, or that induce an excited gang of friends to drive around the Porte Dauphine in their car until they make contact with other cars and all the passengers end up intermingling in a large apartment; and, on the other hand, the soirees curated by Éric and his friends. I preferred the inflexible sequence of the latter and their exclusive goal: there was no rush and no tension; there were no outside factors (alcohol, demonstrative behavior, etc.) to impede the flow of our bodies. Their comings and goings never strayed from their ant-like determination.

  Victor’s birthday parties impressed me the most. At the entrance to his property there were guards with dogs, talking into walkie-talkies, and I was intimidated by the crowds of people. Some women had dressed for the occasion in transparent blouses or dresses; I was envious of them, and as people arrived and met up, sipping their champagne, I stood to one side. I only really relaxed after I had removed my dress or my trousers. My true outfit was my nudity, which protected me.

  I was amused by the architecture of the place because it was similar to the decor of a then very fashionable boutique on the boulevard Saint-Germain, called the “Gaminerie.” It was, on a larger scale than the boutique, a cave, with its attendant cells fashioned in white stucco. This “grotto” was underground, and its sole source of light came from the bottom of a swimming pool on the floor above. Through a pane of glass that formed a sort of vast television screen, we could see the succession of bodies diving in from the upper floor. I am describing a place I never moved through a great deal. The scale of things changed around me, but my situation was not very different from what it had been the first time, with my friends in Lyon. Éric would settle me on a bed or a sofa in one of the alcoves, respecting some vague custom by taking the initiative to undress me and put me on display. He might start to rub me and to kiss me, but then would immediately hand me over to others. I would almost always stay on my back, perhaps because the other most common position, in which the woman actively straddles the man’s pelvis, is less adapted to intervention from several participants and, anyway, implies a more personal relationship between the partners. On my back, I could be stroked by several men while one of them, rearing up to make room and to see what he was doing, would get going in my sex. I was tugged and nibbled in several places at once, one hand rubbing insistently around the available part of my pubis, another skimming broadly across my entire torso or choosing to stroke my nipples…

  I took pleasure in this caressing more than in the penetrations, in particular when it was a penis trailed over the entire surface of my face or a glans that rubbed against my breasts. I liked to catch one in my mouth as it passed by, running my lips up and down it while another came and begged attention on the other side of my outstretched neck, before turning my head to take the newcomer. Or having one in my mouth and one in my hand. My body opened up more under the effects of this kind of stroking, which was relatively brief and could be renewed again and again, than in penetration itself. On that subject, what I remember most is the stiffness between my legs after being pinioned sometimes for four hours, especially as many men tend to keep the woman’s thighs spread well apart, to make the most of the view and to penetrate more deeply. When I was left to rest, I would become aware that my vagina was engorged. It was a pleasure to feel its walls stiffened, heavy, slightly painful, in their own way bearing the imprint of all the members that had labored there.

  The position of the active spider in the middle of her web suited me well. Once—and this was not at Victor’s house but in a sauna at the place Clichy—I hardly left the depths of a big armchair the whole evening, even though there was a huge bed in the middle of the room. With my head on a level with the dicks that came in range, I could suck one while, with my hands on the armrests, I jerked off two more. My legs were lifted up very high, and one after another, those who had become sufficiently aroused followed through in my cunt.

  I sweat very little, but sometimes I was drenched in my partners’ sweat. There would also be threads of sperm that dried along the tops of my thighs, sometimes on my breasts or my face, even in my hair, and men who are into orgies really like shooting their load in a cunt that’s already dripping with cum. From time to time, on the pretext of going to the toilet, I would manage to extricate myself from the group and go to wash. Victor’s house had a bathroom with a bluish light that was clear enough without being violent. A mirror took up the entire wall above the bath, and the deep, hazy image it reflected softened the atmosphere still further. I saw my body in it and was amazed to see that it was smaller, slimmer, than it had felt a few moments earlier. In the bathroom, more gentle exchanges took place. There was always someone there to compliment me on my olive skin or on the savoir faire I demonstrated with my mouth—and I didn’t respond in the same way as when, buried under bodies, I could hear, as if from a long way away, a conversation about myself, rather like a sleeping patient making out the doctors’ and the interns’ comments as they made their rounds of the beds.

  A jet of water on my gaping, swollen pussy. But few were the times when a man who had also come there for a pause did not make the most of the moment that I squatted over the bidet to jiggle his softened but always willing dick against my lips. And quite often, scarcely freshened up, I would stand and, putting my hands on the sink, offer my vulva to increasingly firm pressure from an organ that eventually managed to deliver a few thrusts. One of my favorite delights is the pleasure given by a penis slipping between the labia like that and then asserting itself there, progressively separating them, before burying itself in what I have had plenty of time to establish as an eagerly accommodating space.

  I have never had to suffer any kind of clumsiness or brutality, and I have generally been lucky with the attentiveness of my partners. If I was tired or the position was becoming uncomfortable, I only had to let it be known, often using Éric as my intermediary because he was never far away, and I would be left to rest or to get up. In fact, the unforced kindness, amounting almost to indifference, that surrounded me at orgies perfectly suited me as I was then, young and awkward in my relationships with other people. The population in the Bois de Boulogne was more mixed—socially, too—and I think that there I probably sometimes came across men who were even more shy than I was. I saw little of their faces, but I would catch some of them looking at me with something approaching caution in their eyes, or even amazement. There were the regulars who knew the place well and would briefly take the initiative in organizing the goings-on, and there were the more furtive ones, and there were also those who watched without joining in. Even though the venue and the participants changed from time to time, and Éric made it his job to find new arrangements—with me always following a little apprehensively—what paradoxically gave me pleasure was identifying familiar feelings in unusual circumstances.

  One particular episode was full of contrasts. I had found a space on a concrete bench with a really rough, grainy surface. A group had formed: I had the pelvises of three or four men around my head, wanting me to take them in my mouth, but I could also catch glimpses of the pale hands of the outer circle as they traced a rhythmic action on their dicks in the darkness, like coiled springs quivering to the touch. Behind them were a few more shadows looking on. Just as someone was beginning to lift up my clothes, we heard the crunching sound of a car crash. I was left alone. We were in one of those clumps of trees planted along the boulevard de l’Amiral-Bruix near the Porte Maillot. I waited a moment and then went and joined the group in the clearing between the hedges. An Austin Mini had run straight into one of the lampposts down the center of the avenue. Someone said there was a young woman inside. A crazed little dog was running up and down. The bulb inside the lamppost and the car headlights were still on, creating a strange blend of yellow and white light. We must have heard the sirens of the emergency vehicles quite soon, because I went back to the bench. As if the space inside the l
ittle copse had been elastic, the circle formed again and the actors picked up the scene where it had been interrupted. A few words were exchanged; the sight of the accident suddenly reinforced what had been a tacit link between us, and there I was back with my ephemeral little community, completely at one with its focused and very unusual activity.

  I liked slipping into the rare snatches of conversation and the ordinary gestures and positions that, in the Bois, both tempered and highlighted the more extraordinary encounters. One evening when the Porte Dauphine was virtually deserted, our car headlights picked out two very tall black men standing on the edge of the pavement. They looked as if they were lost or waiting, in this desolate backwater, for an improbable bus. They took me and Éric to a place nearby, to a small attic room. The room and the bed were both narrow. They took me one after the other. While one was on top of me, the other sat on the corner of the bed and made no attempt to join in. He just watched. They made big, slow movements and had long cocks like I’d never seen before, not too thick and able to penetrate very far without my having to spread my legs too wide. They were like twins. Two gentle, unhurried couplings in a row. They touched me with a sort of precision, and in return I reveled in the vast skin surface that they presented to me. I really think that, that particular time, I took the time to feel each stroke of their patient thrusting. While I was getting dressed, they chatted to Éric about the Bois de Boulogne and about their work as cooks. As we left they thanked me with all the sincerity of polite hosts, and my memory of them is full of affection.

  At Chez Aimé, relations between people were not so civil. Aimé was a very popular swingers club. People came from very far away, even from abroad, to stay there. Years after it had closed, I still marveled like an awestruck schoolgirl when Éric listed the famous people—the film stars, singers, sports personalities and businessmen—I might have met there without actually opening my eyes enough to recognize them. During the time we went there, a film that parodied some aspects of the sexual revolution came out. One scene took place in a club that looked like Chez Aimé; it showed a group of men thronging round a table. There was a woman lying on the table, but all you could see were her legs, in high boots, jiggling comically over their heads. Because those sort of boots were in fashion at the time, and I wore them, and even tended to keep them on when I wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing because they were difficult to remove, and because I must have brandished them in the air like that more than once as I lay on a table, I was vain enough to think that it might well be my minimal attire and my waving in the air that had fired the director’s imagination.